This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: People with power are more quickly singled out as the culprit when something goes wrong but it is unclear who made the mistake. That is shown by a series of studies by researchers at the University of Amsterdam.
In one, they analyzed almost 100,000 everyday conflicts on the Reddit page "Am I the Asshole?" According to the researchers, people with power are more readily blamed because others think they can "get away with anything." The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The key question the researchers wanted to answer was whether power confers an advantage when someone is linked to wrongdoing but the perpetrator is unknown. To find out, they carried out four studies that tested two opposing assumptions: Power elicits respect and admiration and protects people, versus the hypothesis that power increases the likelihood that someone will be seen as the culprit.
In a first experiment, participants played a dice game and were told that the other participants had the role of boss, assistant or bookkeeper. They could earn money by rolling a die 20 times and reporting their own results: The higher the total, the more money. Each participant then received the role of "consultant," who had to check whether the other players were honest.
Through a hidden chip, they could see the actual rolls, while they were given a score sheet, with the owner unknown to them, that clearly deviated from reality. The "boss" was most often identified as the cheat and was also trusted less in a subsequent game. In a second experiment, participants read about a fraud case in a finance department in which a lot of money had disappeared.
The department had 15 employees; everyone had access to the financial systems, and everyone was a suspect. Participants then saw information about one "randomly chosen" male employee: This was either the finance director, with a lot of power, or an ordinary accountant, with little power. The finance director was clearly more often seen as the most likely fraudster.
"In both experiments, participants reported a sense of impunity and the impression that the powerful suspect thought he could get away with anything," explains lead researcher and social psychologist Gerben van Kleef. "This feeling was most strongly associated with higher attributions of guilt." To test whether these patterns also occur outside the lab, the researchers analyzed 97,628 posts on the popular Reddit forum "Am I the Asshole?" On this forum, people present everyday disputes and norm violations to be judged by others. For each post, it was determined whether the person who submitted the case was in a higher, lower or equal power position relative to the other parties in the case, for example, boss versus employee, parent versus child or tenant versus landlord.
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